Sean Walther's Blog

Properly Reacting to Statistical Problems, an IE6 Realization

As a web developer, I closely associate “IE6″ with bad things.

CSS — IE6 will ruin it.
Nice AJAX effects — won’t look right in IE6.
Transparencies — IE6 is always finicky.
Simple “No Table” code — IE6 will break something.

I have said to clients before that including IE6 in any technical requirements probably means an additional 15-20% in terms of cost of developing any complicated UI elements.  It’s probably more than that.

Digg.com, the news aggregator, has posted in their blog an article, Much Ado About IE6 by Mark Trammell.  Read the article, they wrote it up much better than I did.  My point is different, I wanted to highlight the brilliance of really digging into statistics.  Traffic reports are just numbers, you have to find out what they mean.

Frequently statistics have an “obvious” reason.  While that reason is “obvious” it may not be accurate.

Always ask questions, your users will appreciate it.

The Situation

Digg leverages AJAX in such a way that you almost don’t even notice it’s there.  They have perfected the use of buttons that make calls without full page refreshes (imagine the CPU / bandwidth load that saves!).  In developing features they see that their IE6 usage is at approximately 10%.  That’s still quite an audience to ignore.

IE6 was released EIGHT years ago, and people are still using it.  What technical toys are you using now that you had in 2001?  Remember your MP3 player back then?  Mine was the Creative Labs Nomad II MG with 32 MB of built in memory (please don’t buy it).  My computer monitor back then was HUGE.

People still use IE6.

The Details

Digg has 10% visitors using IE6.  So they had coded all their functionality for the quirks in IE6.  It was stealing time from their dev team who should have been working on other features, instead of coding today’s website for the browser of a decade ago.

The smart folks that make up the Digg team decided to look a little further into this.  They found that while IE6 users made up 10% of all page views, it only made up approximatly 1% of the diggs/buries/comments.  They do not provide details on the numbers for non IE6 browsers, but we would see that they make up increasing percentages of all interactivity on the site.

One option is to prompt all IE6 users to upgrade, after all, it is about time.

Taking it a step further, they research why the people are using IE6 with a poll on their site and come up with:

It turns out IE6 users are only IE6 users because their workplaces haven’t upgraded really.  So if Digg implemented the “reminder” function on the website, the would have just told people to upgrade who weren’t allowed or able to.

The Conclusion

I was thinking it too, just eliminate IE6 as a requirement, or force them to upgrade.

That would have pissed off a bunch of people for no real results.

If something is important to you, dote on it.  Spend time thinking about it.  There are obvious answers, those are for people who are not willing to really dive into something.

I’m going to think about making browser decisions differently in future projects myself.

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